When Jesus Isn’t Common Ground Anymore How to Pastor Across the Moral Divide

Rev. Dr. Leah D. Schade

During a recent Moses Project session on sermon pushback, a pastor described preaching on the Beatitudes in a politically divided congregation. He situated the text within the Sermon on the Mount and quoted Jesus’s own words. After the service, an upset parishioner confronted him, disagreeing with everything he had said.

His reply: “Your argument isn’t with me. It’s with Jesus.”

Then he made an observation that has stayed with me. We tend to assume that Jesus is common ground, that saying “Jesus said this” will settle the matter. “But it seems that there’s at least a certain percentage of people who don’t like what Jesus says anymore,” he said. “It’s not the same grounding we were used to.” His comment names the pastoral challenge: invoking Jesus does not resolve disagreement when people no longer share an understanding of who Jesus is or what his teachings require.

Jesus as a cipher

Do an image search for depictions of Jesus on Christian nationalist and right-wing extremist websites, and you will find gun-toting Jesuses and warmongering Jesuses. There is no longer a shared understanding of who Jesus is. He has become a cipher: an empty symbol that can be filled with whatever meaning a person wants to give it. Anyone who wants to an image of Jesus for a particular purpose can do so.

Some Christians are being formed by voices antithetical to the gospel while their pastors work from a different theological and moral framework. In our 2025 national survey of mainline Protestant clergy, my research team—the Rev. Dr. Amanda Wilson Harper, Dr. Wayne Thompson, and I—found that 64% of pastors identified as progressive, while pastors estimated that only 26% of their congregants were progressive. That gap helps explain why pastors and parishioners may hear the same words of Jesus and draw sharply different conclusions.

A parishioner catechized by conservative news sources may hear your sermons and prayers through a lens that conflicts with the sermon’s theological and moral framework. Unless that difference is named and explore, pastor and parishioner may interpret the same message in fundamentally different ways. This can harden into discord between pastor and congregation.

This means we have a lot of work to do as clergy simply to teach people who Jesus was, what he did, what he actually said, and how his teaching fits within the scope of Scripture. Someone can cherry-pick almost anything Jesus said and make it support the exact opposite of God’s character. It is our job to stand against that and reassert what Jesus did and what he taught: love, forgiveness, justice, and righteousness.

Listening for the moral framework

So how do we pastor across this moral divide? One tool I find helpful comes from Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided About Religion and Politics. Haidt argues that people don’t decide what is right and wrong in just one way. He identifies six moral frameworks:

•             Care versus harm

•             Fairness versus cheating

•             Liberty versus oppression

•             Loyalty versus betrayal

•             Authority versus subversion

•             Sanctity versus degradation

These frameworks can come into conflict. Take immigration. You might preach that Christians are called to welcome the stranger fleeing violence, speaking from care versus harm. One listener hears it through fairness: “It’s not fair that they get to jump the line.” Another hears it through authority: “They broke the law.” A third hears it through loyalty: “We should take care of our own first.” Each is a genuine moral concern, even if you disagree with how it is being applied. Recognizing the framework at work does not require accepting the listener’s conclusion; it gives you a starting point for asking how the concern relates to the gospel and for identifying any values you genuinely share.

The frameworks also shift the conversation from who is right to how each of us is responding. Instead of beginning with debate, you might ask, “When you heard that sermon, how were you feeling?” and then, “What did you hear me say?” Now the focus is on the lenses we each bring, and the sermon becomes something we examine together in a spirit of collaboration.

Naming the hard thing together

In Preaching and Social Issues, I argue that preachers can and should address contemporary topics affecting people’s lives and communities—and to do so with biblical, theological, and ethical foundations. Many would call this “prophetic preaching.” However, I’m not saying everyone has to put on camel’s hair and eat locusts for lunch like John the Baptist. Instead, each preacher needs to discern the approach that works for them and their context. I describe three approaches to a sermon addressing social issues: gentle, invitational, and robust. Each approach has different tactics that can be useful for either introducing a topic, going deeper, or equipping people to put their faith into action. Take the free five-minute Assessment Tool for Ministry and Social Issues, and invite your leadership take it too, so that you can discern what approach would work well in your congregation.

For preachers who feel hesitant to address a social issue, simply introducing the topic can open the door: “I know this is challenging, but Jesus talked about tough things too. We have enough trust to ask these questions together and see where God leads us.”

A vaccine for conflict

The best time to do this work is before a crisis. In Preaching in the Purple Zone, I offer a worksheet called “Discovering Our Theologies of Conflict,” which helps congregations think theologically and biblically about conflict. Having difficult but healthy conversations when there is no crisis is like a vaccine: it gives the congregation a safer encounter with disagreement and helps the community recognize patterns that are constructive or toxic before the stakes are high.

For step-by-step guidance on responding when someone confronts you after a sermon, see my companion piece at Patheos, “Navigating Pushback on Social Justice Sermons: Guidance from Proverbs.”

Jesus may no longer be common ground for everyone in our pews. But his words and witness still call us to build bridges, and that is where we stand as we pastor across the divide.